


Coffee and Tea

by Flyting



Series: Rumbelle/Dark One OT3 [1]
Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Codependency, Domestic Fluff, F/M, Kissing, Multi, OT3, Pre-Threesome, The Dark One is an awkward houseguest, Touching, cuddle piles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-08
Updated: 2015-10-08
Packaged: 2018-04-25 11:29:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,582
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4958905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Flyting/pseuds/Flyting
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Belle carefully shifts her legs out from under the pile, moving slowly so as not to disturb either of them. There is a hand curled possessively around her thigh, a hand which she notices is a mottled green-gold instead of familiar pink. She removes it with a half-hearted swat. The Dark One pulls his hand back with a sleepy grumble, tucking it under Rumplestiltskin’s hip instead. His arms cinch tighter around Rumplestiltskin’s waist as Belle slips out from under the covers, pulling him close like a child’s favorite toy. </i>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Rumplestiltskin/Belle/The Dark One OT3 domestic fluff. In which Rumple and the Curse are happy to be free of each other, but there's a certain level of familiarity that comes from sharing a body for several centuries. Belle is not sure what she thinks of this.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Coffee and Tea

At some point, Belle has gotten used to waking in a confused tangle of too-many limbs.

She stretches, curling her toes and blinking awake in the soft, early-morning light. Rumplestiltskin’s slow breathing ruffles the hair on the top of her head, where she had made a pillow of his narrow chest. A conspicuous silence from the other side of his body suggests that the other is, if not sleeping, then at least resting so still and quietly that she cannot tell the difference.

The Dark One does not need to sleep, he had told her once, full of haughty glee.

“He doesn’t need to drool on my pillows either, but he does.” Rumplestiltskin had quipped back, catching her eye and smirking as she giggled into her tea.

Belle carefully shifts her legs out from under the pile, moving slowly so as not to disturb either of them. There is a hand curled possessively around her thigh, a hand which she notices is a mottled green-gold instead of familiar pink. She removes it with a half-hearted swat. The Dark One pulls his hand back with a sleepy grumble, tucking it under Rumplestiltskin’s hip instead. His arms cinch tighter around Rumplestiltskin’s waist as Belle slips out from under the covers, pulling him close like a child’s favorite toy.

Her husband lies there boneless, allowing himself to be clutched tightly. He still sleeps deeply and often, even in spite of the lengthy enchanted sleep that had followed the breaking of the curse.

It had shocked her- terrified her- the first time she had come home to find Rumplestiltskin resting on the couch with his dark doppelganger’s limbs twined around him like strangling ivy, sharp-nailed hands gently petting his hair. They were muttering softly to each other, faces close enough to share breath. A strange mockery of a lover’s embrace.

She had nearly run for the dagger, and damn the consequences. There were many things Belle could tolerate for Rumplestiltskin’s sake. She had endured captivity. Put up with his moods and capricious whims under the curse. She tolerated the Dark One itself in their home, if only because- in its newly physical form- it had nowhere else to go, and because Rumplestiltskin’s condition improved in its presence. But she would take the dagger and destroy it herself before she allowed it to consume him again.

That first time, Rumplestiltskin had stopped her with stammered word, pleading with her to let him explain- that it wasn’t what it looked like- as if she had caught him embracing another woman!

“I’m alright, really. It helps… being close. With the pain,” he had said. “There are times when it feels like I’ve lost a limb. This helps.”

“We were one for so long. It’s… strange sometimes. To be two,” the Dark One said slowly, without releasing its clinging grasp on him, and Belle had wondered for the first time if this new separation was painful for it too.

“Not to worry, dearie! I’ll not eat him up. I’m having far too much fun on my own,” it had added, smiling at her with familiar stained teeth. Belle pursed her lips. She hated when it spoke like him.

But she hadn’t gone for the dagger that day. Nor the next.

With her tacit permission, the Dark One had proved itself to be surprisingly tactile, at least with Rumplestiltskin. They stood hip-to-hip in the study, its arm draped possessively over his shoulders. It guided him down the stairs with a hand on the small of his back. Petted and cossetted him during his increasingly infrequent moments of weakness.

The dagger remained where Belle had left it. Safely locked away. Though she had considered it when, weeks later, she got out of the bath and found that she had to climb over a clinging pile of protesting dark sorcerer to lie next to her husband in bed.

For his measure, Rumplestiltskin never seemed to mind the contact.

“This is really nothing, when you’ve been as close as we have,” he said wryly one day, when Belle again found them on the couch, this time with the Dark One's head pillowed in his lap.

Belle wraps herself in a robe and pads downstairs to the kitchen on bare feet. Busies herself with filling the kettle and at least switching on the coffee maker- tea for her and Rumplestiltskin, coffee for the other one. She considers starting breakfast, perhaps some eggs, but in the end settles for slicing up a bit of fruit and picking at it while she prepares a mug and tea for herself. She isn’t terribly hungry, and there’s no telling whether Rumplestiltskin will be awake any time soon.

He has improved over the past few weeks. Belle can’t deny that. He still sleeps like the dead and tries to stay off his feet for long periods, but he’s no longer the pale and shaking creature from months ago, who could barely make it from the car to the front door without stopping for a rest.

Ripping the curse from him so suddenly had nearly killed Rumplestiltskin. The darkness spent so long hollowing its way inside him unchecked, like some insidious climbing vine creeping through the brick wall of a building, that what was left after it was removed could barely stand on its own. She can’t begrudge him this strange clinging closeness, not if it gives him a way to draw strength from the curse without being consumed by it.

As for the Dark One… Belle wonders sometimes, late at night, what it must be like to spend the whole of your existence sharing the body of another, and then to suddenly find yourself an independent creature. How must it feel to be the only voice in your own head, for something that has never spent even a moment alone?

Lonely, Belle thinks. In its place, she might seek out touch as well, simply as a way to feel whole again.

The kettle sings, distracting her from her thoughts. She removes it from the heat and sets it aside to cool for a moment.

She turns, reaching back to her plate for another piece of strawberry, and nearly yelps, her heart leaping into her throat, when she realizes that she’s suddenly no longer alone in the kitchen.

The Dark One wiggles his fingers in greeting and pops one of her banana slices into his mouth. He was standing right behind her, having made no sound entering the room.

His mottled green-gold skin and sharp curls couldn’t be more out of place in their sleek and modern Storybrooke kitchen- a relic from another world- even if he is barefoot and wearing a pair of Rumplestiltskin’s black silk pajamas.

“That wasn’t funny,” Belle says, moving the plate out of his reach and wishing her heart would slow down.

“Not to you,” he smirks. She shakes her head. A good day with him was not unlike being back at the Dark Castle with Rumplestiltskin. On one of Rumple's worst days.

Belle half-turns to transfer her hot water from the kettle to the teapot and add the leaves.  
  
“Where’s Rumple?” she asks.

“Still out like a light,” out of the corner of her eye she sees him gesture vaguely in the direction of upstairs. He leans in over her shoulder, until she can just barely feel the heat of his breath on her ear. “Did someone wear him out last night?” His voice is full of mischief.

Belle pointedly ignores the question. “So you came down here just to startle me?”

“No,” he scoffs, the very picture of affronted innocence.

Belle turns around, raising an eyebrow and pinning him with her best stare.

“… well, maybe a little.”

Moments like these, he sounds so much like the Rumplestiltskin she first knew that it’s easy to forget that he’s not.  
  
He wanders over to the coffee maker and prods at it, growling as he pushes the handle on the front this way and that. It’s a complicated little device- all buttons and silver nozzles. Rumplestiltskin is the only one who knows how to make it work.

Belle turns back to her breakfast, picking at strawberry and banana slices with her fingers while her tea steeps.

“You can have some of my tea, if you like,” she says, placidly.

“I’d like for you to learn how to use this thing,” he growls.

“Why not learn yourself? I’m sure I’d be embarrassed if I were the great, fearsome Dark One and didn’t even know how to work the coffee maker.”

Belle has just enough presence of mind to remember- a moment too late- that as much as he looks like him, this isn’t Rumplestiltskin and that perhaps she shouldn’t be so quick to tease the millennia-old being of pure darkness. He narrows his eyes at her, a look that from Rumplestiltskin used to mean a challenge.

“Not when I know so many other things,” he says, silky and full of menace. “Like how to make a flaying last for days-“

Belle cannot help herself- she laughs, nearly choking on a piece of strawberry. Oh it, was a dreadful thing to say, but it was also precisely how Rumplestiltskin would have responded, right down to the finger halfway in her face.

“I’m sorry,” she says, giggling again at his offended expression. “I am. It’s just hard to be terrified when you sound so much like him.”

To Belle’s surprise, he makes a sound in the back of his throat that might have been a laugh and reaches past her, stealing another slice of banana off her plate. “No, you never did find him very intimidating, did you?” he says thoughtfully.

He leans in conspiratorially, “Just between the two of us, it used to drive him crazy.”

Belle leans as well, a smirk crawling up the corners of her mouth, “Just between us, that might have been why I did it.”

He does laugh this time, low and warm, and the sound is so decidedly unlike Rumplestiltskin that it’s jarring. She tries to cover her sudden unease by busying her hands with pouring tea into her mug and adding a bit of sugar. When she’s done, she leans against the counter sipping at the still slightly too hot water.

He watches her in silence.

“… why do you do it?” Belle asks, finally. “Look and act so much like him. I mean, Emma said you could be… anyone you wanted. Why him?”  
  
He is thoughtful for a moment. Instead of responding, he disappears in a cloud of purple magic. When it clears, there is an older man in his place with the same green-gold skin, but wild grey hair and piercing blue eyes. “Would you like me to be someone else? Like this, hm?” he asks. Belle’s mouth gapes open. She doesn’t answer.

“Or,” the man says slyly, and disappears again, to be replaced with a perfect simulacrum of Emma Swan, her hair and lips frost-white. “Maybe this is more your style,” she says. She leans in, placing one hand on the countertop to either side of Belle, so that she is trapped between them, “I’m game if you’d rather curl up next to this at night. Gotta admit, it felt great to be inside her. She was so fresh. So much anger-”

“Stop it,” Belle says, feeling vaguely disgusted. With him- her- it, and with herself for starting the conversation in the first place. She should have known she wouldn’t get an honest answer.

She pushes at a leather-clad arm until it relents and lets her out. When she turns back around, he looks like Rumplestiltskin again.

He leans against the counter in the space she had so recently vacated, crossing one leg over the other. He folds his arms over his chest, staring at some point on the floor past her feet.

“I like to be him because… he’s familiar. Comfortable. I enjoyed who I was, when I was him. Who we were.”

Perhaps it’s possible, she thinks, that Rumplestiltskin left his mark on the Dark One, just as surely as the darkness stained him.  
  
“Do you miss it?” Belle asks, half-fearing the answer. “Being… being in him?”

“…Every now and then. But I like this freedom much more. Doing as I like. Choosing for myself. Never needing to cajole nor compromise.” He gives her a thin-lipped smile. “Having coffee instead of tea.”

“When you can get the coffee-machine to work,” Belle says.

“When I can, yes.” He snaps his fingers in the air and the machine hisses to life, gurgling and spitting steaming liquid in to a waiting mug.

Belle laughs, shaking her head. “If you can do that, why do you bother Rumple every morning to make your coffee for you?”

“Tastes better when he makes it,” he says, wrinkling his nose as he blows on the hot drink.

She reaches past him for her abandoned cup of tea. It’s cooled to just the perfect temperature.

“You know,” he says conversationally, “I have never once liked tea? Not in a thousand years. Water with leaves in it, how disgusting. But this one? Tea every morning with breakfast. Sometimes two cups. For centuries.” He shudders theatrically. “I think he was doing it to punish me.”

“Well, you probably deserved it,” Belle says wryly.

“Oh, completely.” He snickers into his cup. “But that’s not the point.”

“Sharing a body isn’t all it’s made out to be?”  
  
“Not a bit. This is better. You needn’t worry that I’m going to take him over again.”

Belle nods. She hadn’t exactly tried to hide her fears. It was almost comforting, his reassurance. Almost.

“If I can believe you,” she says, only half joking. “The Dark One lies, remember?”

He smiles at her, just a little twinge in the corner of his mouth. It’s exactly the way Rumplestiltskin used to look at her, when he thought she couldn’t see his face.

“It’s good to see someone pays attention.” He sets his cup on the counter and approaches her until they are standing face to face and he is leaning close to her ear as if he’s going to tell her a secret.

“Just between us, I might have lied about one thing.”

“And what is that?” Belle asks, deliberately not moving away. She wouldn’t allow him to think he could intimidate her by invading her personal space.

“There’s another reason I choose to look like him,” he says, singsong, and so quietly that she is obliged to lean in just a bit further to hear him.

“Yes?”

They are very nearly cheek to cheek.

“Because you like him.” He whispers in her ear.

Her brow furrows. Before Belle can begin to parse what he means by that, he closes the last big of distance between them, turning her face towards him with one finger pressed to her cheek, and kisses her.

She very nearly drops her empty tea mug, but he plucks it from her slack hands before it can slip to the floor.

It’s a curiously sweet kiss. A slow soft press of lips before her bottom lip is captured between both of his and sucked. The bare hint of pressure against the small of her back, pulling her closer. Unthinking, she makes a small sound in the back of her throat.

And then he’s gone, taking her mug with him and leaving Belle standing stock still in the middle of the kitchen, still trying to make sense of what just happened.


End file.
